notice how we give God human characteristics whenever we try to talk about or describe him...

we refer to him as "him" and give him human emotions like anger, empathy, revenge, and love when we wrote about him in the Bible. we depict him as an old man with a flowing white beard in many paintings and works of art. we gave him the ability to have a son who coincidentally is EXACTLY like us humans. he did not make us in his image, we made him in our image.

think about the most fundamental idea of what god is. even ignoring the more anthropomorphic religious depictions, "he" is the eternal consciousness that birthed the universe. we have no other point of reference for conscious entities besides human beings. the idea that the universe was created intelligently necessarily means that god must be described in this way.

Twamp makes a valid point. Gentiles have created Elohims (gods) after their likeness and culture. Gentiles and other nations have also taken the scriptures and pressed into them to honor their pagan ideologies...giving you a white Zeus messiah and in paintings an old white haired elohim (which these paintings reflect deeper ties into their mystery religions and have nothing to do with the truth, though ignorance or not knowing will keep the simple folks...simple. Threads like these just expose confusion and said ignorance/not knowing).

however, this ignorance or lack of understanding does not take away from the truth of the matter. It's a fools errand to do so. Man was created in his image.

There are many idols and elohims and only one living. YAH knew no other nation besides Israel. To take Gentile interpretations of their gods as a blanket statement over the truth is to be highly ignorant....or not knowing. Every nation on earth has their own elohim...of course they are false. But the simple stop there. That is a mistake.

It's only cus the human ego puts himself above all and wants to put himself in the center of the meaning of existence. I'd rather see God as deep as the cosmos is, if I'd give God a form based on me I'd imagine him as the self which exists outside of thought. Give him an ego and he becomes fallable and imo not as great.

There's the religious man's god - which is all just mass psychological projection. We can't fully tap into the subjective state of others so naturally we ascribe our own feelings and motivations onto them for coherence sake. Once you start thinking of this superintelligent creator being, it's unavoidable that you're going to frame it in human terms. Even the idea of a mechanistic, non-interventionist god still suffers from anthropomorphism.

And then there is the philosopher's god - which isn't so much of a 'god' conventionally speaking but a metaphor for the ebb and flow and observable laws of the physical universe.

And then there is the philosopher's god - which isn't so much of a 'god' conventionally speaking but a metaphor for the ebb and flow and observable laws of the physical universe.

Click to expand...

that's kind of what i meant when i said taking away god's human-like traits essentially makes the concept meaningless. god as a metaphor for the universe sounds cooler/more romantic than just saying the universe, but it doesn't add any meaning imo.

Intelligence is an open term. It means an all encompassing definition of the word has yet not been established fully, we are still developing our understanding of what intelligence really is. I recommend the book "QI - The quest for intelligence", in it, they show how a whole lot of animals are more intelligent than humans in many ways.